P’TIT-BLEU_Comedies and Errors

P’tit-Bleu, poor P’tit-Bleu! I can’t name her without a sigh;

I can’t think of her without a kind of heartache. Yet, all things

considered, I wonder whether hers was really a destiny to sorrow over.

True, she has disappeared; and it is not pleasant to conjecture what she

may have come to, what may have befallen her, in the flesh, since her

disappearance. But when I remember those beautiful preceding years of

self-abnegation, of great love, and pain, and devotion, I find myself

instinctively believing that something good she must have permanently

gained; some treasure that nothing, not the worst imaginable subsequent

disaster, can quite have taken from her. It is not pleasant to

conjecture what she may have done or suffered in the flesh; but in the

spirit, one may hope, she cannot have gone altogether to the bad, nor

fared altogether ill.

In the spirit! Dear me, there was a time when it would have seemed

derisory to speak of the spirit in the same breath with P’tit-Bleu. In

the early days of my acquaintance with her, for example, I should have

stared if anybody had spoken of her spirit. If anybody had asked me to

describe her, I should have said, “She is a captivating little animal,

pretty and sprightly, but as soulless—as soulless as a squirrel.”

Oh, a warm-blooded little animal, good-natured, quick-witted, full of

life and the joy of life; a delightful little animal to play with, to

fondle; but just a little animal, none the less: a little mass of soft,

rosy, jocund, sensual, soulless matter. And in her full red lips, her

roguish black eyes, her plump little hands, her trim, tight little

figure—in her smile, her laugh—in the toss of her head—in her

saucy, slightly swaggering carriage—I fancy you would have read my

appreciation justified. No doubt there must have been the spark 01 a

soul smouldering somewhere in her (how, otherwise, account for what

happened later on?), but it was far too tiny a spark to be perceptible

to the casual observer. Soul, however, I need hardly add, was the last

thing we of the University were accustomed to look for in our feminine

companions; I must not for an instant seem to imply that the lack of a

soul in P’tit-Bleu was a subject of mourning with any of us. That a

Latin Quarter girl should be soulless was as much a part of the natural

order of creation, as that she should be beardless. They were all of

them little animals, and P’tit-Bleu diverged from the type principally

in this, that where the others, in most instances, were stupid,

objectionable little animals, she was a diverting one. She was made of

sugar and spice and a hundred nice ingredients, whilst they were made of

the dullest, vulgarest clay.

In my own case, P’tit-Bleu was the object, not indeed of love, but of

a violent infatuation, at first sight.

At Bullier, one evening, a chain of students, some twenty linked hand in

hand, were chasing her round and round the hall, shouting after her,

in rough staccato, something that sounded like, “Ti-bah! Ti-bah!

Ti-bah!”—while she, a sprite-like little form, in a black skirt and

a scarlet bodice, fled before them with leaps and bounds, and laughed

defiantly.

I hadn’t the vaguest notion what “Ti-bah! Ti-bah! Ti-bah!” meant,

but that laughing face, with the red lips and the roguish eyes, seemed

to me immensely fascinating. Among the faces of the other young

ladies present—faces of dough, faces of tallow, faces all weariness,

staleness, and banality, common, coarse, pointless, insipid faces—it

shone like an epigram amongst platitudes, a thing of fire amongst things

of dust. I turned to some one near me, and asked who she was.

“It’s P’tit-Bleu, the dancing girl. She’s going to do a

quadrille.”

P’tit-Bleu.... It’s the fashion, you know, in Paris, for the girls

who “do quadrilles” to adopt unlikely nicknames: aren’t the

reigning favourites at this moment Chapeau-Mou and Fifi-la-Galette?

P’tit-Bleu had derived hers from that vehement little “wine of the

barrier,” which, the song declares, “vous met la tête en feu.” It

was the tune of the same song, that, in another minute, I heard the

band strike up, in the balcony over our heads. P’tit-Bleu came to a

standstill in the middle of the floor, where she was joined by three

minor dancing-girls, to make two couples. The chain of students closed

in a circle round her. And the rest of us thronged behind them, pressing

forward, and craning our necks. Then, as the band played, everybody

sang, in noisy chorus:

“P’tit-Bleu, P’tit-Bleu, P’tit-Bleu-eu,

Ça vous met la tête en feu!

Ça vous ra-ra-ra-ra-ra,

Ça vous ra-ra-ravigotte!”

P’tit-Bleu stood with her hands on her hips, her arms a-kimbo, her

head thrown impudently back, her eyes sparkling mischievously, her

lips curling in a perpetual play of smiles, while her three subalterns

accomplished their tame preliminary measures; and then P’tit-Bleu

pirouetted forward, and began her own indescribable pas-seul—oh,

indescribable for a hundred reasons. She wore scarlet satin slippers,

embroidered with black beads, and black silk stockings with scarlet

clocks, and simply cataracts and cataracts of white diaphanous frills

under her demure black skirt. And she danced with constantly increasing

fervour, kicked higher and higher, ever more boldly and more bravely.

Presently her hat fell off, and she tossed it from her, calling to

the member of the crowd who had the luck to catch it, “Tiens mon

chapeau!” And then her waving black hair flowed down her back,

and flew loose about her face and shoulders. And the whole time, she

laughed—laughed—laughed. With her swift whirlings, her astonishing

undulations, and the flashing of the red and black and white, one’s

eyes were dazzled. “Ça vous met la tête en feu!” My head burned

and reeled, as I watched her, and I thought, “What a delicious,

bewitching little creature! What wouldn’t I give to know her!” My

head burned, and my heart yearned covetously; but I was a new-comer in

the Quarter, and ignorant of its easy etiquette, and terribly young and

timid, and I should never have dared to speak to her without a proper

introduction. She danced with constantly increasing fervour, faster,

faster, furiously fast: till, suddenly—zip!—down she slid upon the

floor, in the grand écart, and sat there (if one may call that posture

sitting), smiling calmly up at us, whilst everybody thundered, “Bravo!

Bravo! Bravo!”

In an instant, though, she was on her feet again, and had darted out of

the circle to the side of the youth who had caught her hat. He offered

it to her with a bow, but his pulses were thumping tempestuously, and no

doubt she could read his envy in his eyes. Anyhow, all at once, she put

her arm through his, and said—oh, thrills and wonders!—“Allons,

mon petit, I authorise you to treat me to a bock.”

It seemed as if impossible heavens had opened to me; yet there she

was, clinging to my arm, and drawing me towards the platform under the

musicians’ gallery, where there are tables for the thirsty. Her little

plump white hand lay on my coat-sleeve; the air was heady with

the perfume of her garments; her roguish black eyes were smiling

encouragement into mine; and her red lips were so near, so near, I had

to fight down a wild impulse to stoop and snatch a kiss. She drew me

towards the tables, and, on the way, she stopped before a mirror fixed

in the wall, and rearranged her hair; while I stood close to her, still

holding her hat, and waited, feeling the most exquisite proud swelling

of the heart, as if I owned her. Her hair put right, she searched in

her pocket and produced a small round ivory box, from which—having

unscrewed its cover and handed it to me with a “Tiens ça”—she

extracted a powder-puff; and therewith she proceeded gently, daintily,

to dust her face and throat, examining the effect critically in the

glass the while. In the end she said, “Voilà, that’s better,”

and turned her face to me for corroboration. “That’s better, isn’t

it?” “It’s perfect. But—but you were perfect before, too,”

asseverated I. Oh, what a joy beyond measure thus to be singled out

and made her confidant and adviser in these intimate affairs.... At our

table, leaning back nonchalantly in her chair, as she quaffed her bock

and puffed her cigarette, she looked like a bright-eyed, red-lipped

bacchante.

I gazed at her in a quite unutterable ecstasy of admiration. My

conscience told me that I ought to pay her a compliment upon her

dancing; but I couldn’t shape one: my wits were paralysed by my

emotions. I could only gaze, and gaze, and revel in my unexpected

fortune. At last, however, the truth burst from me in a sort of

involuntary gasp.

“But you are adorable—adorable.”

She gave a quick smile of intelligence, of sympathy, and, with a knowing

toss of the head and a provoking glance, suggested, “Je te mets la

tête en feu, quoi!” She, you perceive, was entirely at her ease,

mistress of the situation. It is conceivable that she had met neophytes

before—that I was by no means to her the unprecedented experience

she was to me. At any rate, she understood my agitation and sought to

reassure me. “Don’t be afraid; I’ll not eat you,” she promised.

I, in the depths of my mind, had been meditating what I could not but

deem an excessively audacious proposal Her last speech gave me my cue,

and I risked it.

“Perhaps you would like to eat something else? If—if we should go

somewhere and sup?”

“Monsieur thinks he will be safer to take precautions,” she laughed.

“Well—I submit.”

So we removed ourselves to the cloak-room, where she put on her cloak,

and exchanged her slippers for a pair of boots (you can guess, perhaps,

who enjoyed the beatific privilege of buttoning them for her); and then

we left the Closerie des Lilas, falsely so called, with its flaring gas,

its stifling atmosphere, its boisterous merrymakers, and walked arm

in arm—only this time it was my arm that was within hers—down the

Boul’ Miche, past the Luxembourg gardens, where sweet airs blew in our

faces, to the Gambrinus restaurant, in the Rue de Médicis. And there

you should have seen P’tit-Bleu devouring écrevisses. Whatsoever

this young woman’s hand found to do, she did it with her might. She

attacked her écrevisses with the same jubilant abandon with which she

had executed her bewildering single-step. She devoured them with an

energy, an enthusiasm, a thoroughness, that it was invigorating to

witness; smacking her lips, and smiling, and, from time to time, between

the mouthfuls, breathing soft little interjections of content. When the

last pink shell was emptied, she threw herself back, and sighed, and

explained, with delectable unconsciousness, “I was hungry.” But

at my venturing to protest, “Not really?” she broke into mirthful

laughter, and added, “At least, I had the appearance.” Meanwhile, I

must not fail to mention, she had done abundant honour to her share of a

bottle of chablis.

Don’t be horrified—haven’t the Germans, who ought to know, a

proverb that recommends it? “Wein auf Bier, das rath’ ich Dir.”

I have said that none of us mourned the absence of a soul in

P’tit-Bleu. Nevertheless, as I looked at her to-night, and realised

what a bright, joyous, good-humoured little thing she was, how healthy,

and natural, and even, in a way, innocent she was, I suddenly felt a

curious depression. She was all this, and yet... For just a moment,

perhaps, I did vaguely mourn the lack of something. Oh, she was well

enough for the present; she was joyous, and good-humoured, and innocent

in a way; she was young and pretty, and the world smiled upon her.

But—for the future? When it occurred to me to think of her future—of

what it must almost certainly be like, of what she must almost

inevitably become—I confess my jaw dropped, and the salt of our

banquet lost its savour.

“What’s the matter? Why do you look at me like that?” P’tit-Bleu

demanded.

So I had to pull myself up and be jolly again. It was not altogether

difficult. In the early twenties, troublesome reflections are easily

banished, I believe; and I had a lively comrade.

After her crayfish were disposed of, P’tit-Bleu called for coffee and

lit a cigarette. And then, between whiffs and sips, she prattled gaily

of the subject which, of all subjects, she was probably best qualified

to treat, and which assuredly, for the time being, possessed most

interest for her listener—P’tit-Bleu. She told me, as it were, the

story of her birth, parentage, life, and exploits. It was the simplest

story, the commonest story. Her mother (la recherche de la paternité

est interdite), her mother had died when she was sixteen, and Jeanne

(that was her baptismal name, Jeanne Mérois) had gone to work in the

shop of a dressmaker, where, sewing hard from eight in the morning till

seven at night, with an hour’s intermission at noon, she could earn,

in good seasons, as much as two-francs-fifty a day. Two and a half

francs a day—say twelve shillings a week—in good seasons; and one

must eat, and lodge, and clothe one’s body, and pay one’s laundress,

in good seasons and in bad. It scarcely satisfied her aspirations, and

she took to dancing. Now she danced three nights a week at Bullier, and

during the day gave lessons in her art to a score of pupils, by which

means she contrived to keep the wolf at a respectful distance from her

door. “Tiens, here’s my card,” she concluded, and handed me

an oblong bit of pasteboard, on which was printed, “P’tit-Bleu,

Professeur de Danse, 22, Rue Monsieur le Prince.”

“And you have no lover?” questioned I.

She flashed a look upon me that was quite inexpressibly arch,

and responded instantly, with the charmingest little pout, “But

yes—since I’m supping with him.”

During the winter that followed, P’tit-Bleu and I supped together

somewhat frequently. She was a mere little animal, she had no soul; but

she was the nicest little animal, and she had instincts. She was

more than good-natured, she was kind-hearted; and, according to her

unconventional standards, she was conscientious. It would have amused

and touched you, for example, if you had been taking her about, to

notice her intense solicitude lest you should conduct her entertainment

upon a scale too lavish, her deprecating frowns, her expostulations, her

restraining hand laid on your arm. And the ordinary run of Latin Quarter

girls derive an incommunicable rapture from seeing their cavaliers

wantonly, purposelessly prodigal. With her own funds, on the contrary,

P’tit-Bleu was free-handed to a fault: Mimi and Zizette knew whom to

go to, when they were hard-up. Neither did she confine her benefactions

to gifts of money, nor limit their operation to her particular sex.

More than one impecunious student owed it to her skilful needle that

his clothes were whole, and his linen maintained in a habitable state.

“Fie, Chalks! Your coat is torn, there are three buttons off your

waistcoat, and your cuffs are frayed to a point that is disgraceful.

I’ll come round to-morrow afternoon, and mend them for you.” And

when poor Berthe Dumours was turned out of the hospital, in the dead of

winter, half-cured, and without a penny in her purse, who took her in,

and nursed her, and provided for her during her convalescence?

Oh, she was a good little thing. “P’tit-Bleu’s all right.

There’s nothing the matter with P’tit-Bleu,” was Chalks’s method

of phrasing it.

At the same time, she could be trying, she could be exasperating. And

she had a temper—a temper. What she made me suffer in the way of

jealousy, during that winter, it would be gruesome to recount. She

enjoyed an exceeding great popularity in the Quarter; she was much run

after. It were futile to pretend that she hadn’t her caprices. And she

held herself free as air. She would call no man master.

You might take what she would give, and welcome; but you must claim

nothing as your due. You mustn’t presume upon the fact that she was

supping with you to-night, to complain if she should sup tomorrow with

another. Her concession of a privilege did not by any means imply

that it was exclusive. She would endure no exactions, no control or

interference, no surveillance, above all, no reproaches. Mercy, how

angry she would become if I ventured any, how hoighty-toighty and

unapproachable.

“You imagine that I am your property? Did you invent me? One would say

perhaps that Paris is Constantinople? Ah, mais non!”

She had a temper and a flow of language. There were points you

couldn’t touch without precipitating hail and lightning.

Thus my winter was far from a tranquil one, and before it was half over

I had three grey hairs. Honey and wormwood, happiness and heartburn,

reconciliations and frantic little tiffs, carried us blithely on to

Mi-Carême, when things reached a crisis....

Mi-Carême fell midway in March that year: a velvety, sweet, sunlit

day, Spring stirring in her sleep. P’tit-Bleu and I had spent the

day together, in the crowded, crowded streets. We had visited the

Boulevards, of course, to watch the triumph of the Queen of Washerwomen;

we had pelted everybody with confetti; and we had been pelted so

profusely in return, that there were confetti in our boots, in our

pockets, down our necks, and numberless confetti clung in the black

meshes of P’tit-Bleu’s hair, like little pink, blue, and yellow

stars. But all day long something in P’tit-Bleu’s manner, something

in her voice, her smile, her carriage, had obscurely troubled me;

something not easy to take hold of, something elusive, unformulable,

but disquieting. A certain indefinite aloofness, perhaps; an accentuated

independence; as if she were preoccupied with secret thoughts, with

intentions, feelings, that she would not let me share.

And then, at night, we went to the Opera Ball.

P’tit-Bleu was dressed as an Odalisque: a tiny round Turkish cap set

jauntily sidewise on her head, a short Turkish jacket, both coat and

jacket jingling and glittering with sequins; a long veil of gauze,

wreathed like a scarf round her shoulders; then baggy Turkish trousers

of blue silk, and scarlet Turkish slippers. Oh, she was worth seeing; I

was proud to have her on my arm. Her black crinkling hair, her dancing

eyes, her eager face and red smiling mouth—the Sultan himself might

have envied me such a houri. And many, in effect, were the envious

glances that we encountered, as we made our way into the great

brilliantly lighted ball-room, and moved hither and thither among

the Harlequins and Columbines, the Pierrots, the Toréadors, the

Shepherdesses and Vivandières, the countless fantastic masks, by whom

the place was peopled. P’tit-Bleu had a loup of black velvet, which

sometimes she wore, and sometimes gave to me to carry for her. I don’t

know when she looked the more dangerous, when she had it on, and her

eyes glimmered mysteriously through its peepholes, or when she had it

off.

Many were the envious glances that we encountered, and presently I

became aware that one individual was following us about: a horrid,

glossy creature, in a dress suit, with a top-hat that was much too

shiny, and a hugh waxed moustache that he kept twirling invidiously:

an undersized, dark, Hebraic-featured man, screamingly “rasta’.”

Whithersoever we turned, he hovered annoyingly near to us, and ogled

P’tit-Bleu under my very beard. This was bad enough; but—do sorrows

ever come as single spies?—conceive my emotions, if you please, when,

by-and-by, suspicion hardened into certitude that P’tit-Bleu was not

merely getting a vainglorious gratification from his attentions,

but that she was positively playing up to them, encouraging him to

persevere! She chattered—to me, indeed, but at him—with a vivacity

there was no misconstruing; laughed noisily, fluttered her fan, flirted

her veil, donned and doffed her loup, and, I daresay, when my back

was turned, exchanged actual eye-shots with the brute.... In due time

quadrilles were organised, and P’tit-Bleu led a set. The glossy

interloper was one of the admiring circle that surrounded her. Ugh! his

complacent, insinuating smile, the conquering air with which he twirled

his moustachios. And P’tit-Bleu.... When, at the finish, she sprang

up, after her grand écart, what do you suppose she did?... The brazen

little minx, instead of rejoining me, slipped her arm through his, and

went tripping off with him to the supper-room.

Oh, the night I passed, the night of anguish! The visions that tortured

me, as I tramped my floor! The delirious revenges that I plotted, and

gloated over in anticipation! She had left me—the mockery of it!—she

had left me her loup, her little black velvet loup, with its empty

eye-holes, and its horribly reminiscent smell. Everything P’tit-Bleu

owned was scented with peau-d’.spagne. I wreaked my fury upon that

loup, I promise you. I smote it with my palm, I ground it under my heel,

I tore it limb from limb, I called it all manner of abusive names.

Early in the morning I was at P’tit-Bleu’s house; but the concierge

grunted, “Pas rentrée.” Oh, the coals thereof are coals of fire.

I returned to her house a dozen times that day, and at length, towards

nightfall, found her in. We had a stormy session, but, of course, the

last word of it was hers: still, for all slips, she was one of Eve’s

family. Of course she justified herself, and put me in the wrong. I

went away, vowing I would never, never, never see her again. “Va! Ça

m’est bien égal,” she capped the climax by calling after me. Oh,

youth! Oh, storm and stress! And to think that one lives to laugh at its

memory.

For the rest of that season, P’tit-Bleu and I remained at daggers

drawn. In June I left town for the summer; and then one thing and

another happened, and kept me away till after Christmas.

When I got back, amongst the many pieces of news that I found waiting

for me, there was one that affected P’tit-Bleu.

“P’tit-Bleu,” I was told, “is ’collée’ with an

Englishman—but a grey-beard, mon cher—a gaga—an Englishman old

enough to be her grandfather.”

A stolid, implicit cynicism, I must warn you, was the mode of

the Quarter. The student who did not wish to be contemned for a

sentimentalist, dared never hesitate to believe an evil report, nor to

put the worst possible construction upon all human actions. Therefore,

when I was apprised by common rumour that during the dead season

P’tit-Bleu (for considerations fiscal, bien entendu) had gone to

live “collée” with an Englishman old enough to be her

grandfather—though, as it turned out, the story was the sheerest

fabrication—it never entered my head to doubt it.

At the same time, I confess, I could not quite share the humour of my

compeers, who regarded the circumstance as a stupendous joke. On the

contrary, I was shocked and sickened. I shouldn’t have imagined her

capable of that. She was a mere little animal; she had no soul; she

was bound, in the nature of things, to go from bad to worse, as I had

permitted myself, indeed, to admonish her, in the last conversation we

had had. “Mark my words, you will go from bad to worse.” But I had

thought her such a nice little animal; in my secret heart, I had hoped

that her progress would be slow—even, faintly, that Providence might

let something happen to arrest it, to divert it. And now....!

As a matter of fact, Providence had let something happen to divert

it; and that something was this very relation of hers with an old

Englishman, in which the scandal-lovers of the Latin Quarter were

determined to see neither more nor less than a mercenary “collage.”

The diversion in question, however, was an extremely gradual process.

As yet, it is pretty certain, P’tit-Bleu herself had never so much as

dreamed that any diversion was impending.

But she knew that her relation with the Englishman was an innocent

relation; and of its innocence, I am glad to be able to record, she

succeeded in convincing one, at least, of her friends, tolerably early

in the game.

In the teeth of my opposition, and at the expense of her own pride, she

forced an explanation, which, I am glad to say, convinced me.

I had just passed her and her Englishman in the street. They were

crossing the Boulevard St. Michel, and she was hanging on his arm,

looking up into his face, and laughing. She wore a broad-brimmed black

hat, with a red ribbon in it, and a knot of red ribbon at her throat;

there was a lovely suggestion of the same colour in her cheeks; and

never had her eyes gleamed with sincerer fun.

I assure you, the sensation this spectacle afforded me amounted to a

physical pain—the disgust, the anger. If she could laugh like that,

how little could she feel her position! The hardened shamelessness of

it!

Turning from her to her companion, I own I was surprised and puzzled. He

was a tall, spare old man, not a grey-beard, but a white-beard, and he

had thin snow-white hair. He was dressed neatly indeed, but the very

reverse of sumptuously. His black overcoat was threadbare, his carefully

polished boots were patched. Yet, everybody averred, it was his

affluence that had attracted her; she had taken up with him during

the dead season, because she had been “à sec.” A detail that did

nothing to relieve my perplexity was the character of his face. Instead

of the florid concupiscent face, with coarse lips and fiery eye-balls,

I had instinctively expected, I saw a thin, pale face, with mild,

melancholy eyes, a gentle face, a refined face, rather a weak face,

certainly the very last face the situation called for. He was a

beast, of course, but he didn’t look like a beast. He looked like a

gentleman, a broken-down, forlorn old gentleman, singularly astray from

his proper orbit.

They were crossing the Boulevard St. Michel as I was leaving the Café

Vachette; and at the corner of the Rue des Ecoles we came front to

front. P’tit-Bleu glanced up; her eyes brightened, she gave a little

start, and was plainly for stopping to shake hands. I cut her dead....

I cut her dead, and held my course serenely down the Boulevard—though

I’m not sure my heart wasn’t pounding. But I could lay as unction

to my soul the consciousness of having done the appropriate thing, of

having marked my righteous indignation.

In a minute, however, I heard the pat-pat of rapid footsteps on the

pavement behind me, and my name being called. I hurried on, careful not

to turn my head. But, at Cluny, P’tit-Bleu arrived abreast of me.

“I want to speak to you,” she gasped, out of breath from running.